Stay (25 page)

His mouth was open, but no words came out.

“I saw Annabelle today. She said it must be hard for you to

be here.”

He just kept staring at me. “Fuck,” he said. He ran one hand

through his hair. “Fuck.”

“Why would it be hard for you to be here?”

He thought. He moved his head back and forth a little with

the effort of it. “It’s . . . Your mother loved the water. We had our

honeymoon . . .”

He was lying, it was so obvious. Searching around for words,

same as when you lose your lip gloss under the car seat. “Did it

have to do with Fiona Husted?” It came out like an accusation. I

don’t even know why I said it. Her name just seemed bad-famil-

iar, like when you run across someone you’d met before, couldn’t

recall it, but still had a sense if the experience had been a good

one or not. Maybe I’d heard that name a long time ago when I

should have been sleeping. While I lay awake in my bed with my

pink blanket and my plastic horses, words winding their way up

through the heater vents of our old house.

“Jesus, Clara,” he said.

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“What happened? What?”

“Clara, stop this. Nothing happened.” His face was blazing

red. His eyes—we caught a raccoon once, eating the grapes on

Dad’s vine. We saw him in the glare of our porch light that we’d

suddenly turned on. My father’s eyes looked like his. Caught.

“You had some stupid fling with Fiona Husted. Mom got so

upset she made herself sick?”

“You can’t make someone have an aneurysm, for Christ’s

sake.” He stepped to me. “Clara, come on. Stop this.”

“Wait. You were gone. She was sick and you weren’t there.

You were off with someone else.”

“I was right there. I did everything I could. Everyone did.

They even said at the hospital—there was nothing more that

could have been done.”

His voice caught. He put his palms to his eyes. “Jesus,

please.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Dad. I’m sorry.”

“Let it alone, Clara.”

The little blue flame under the sauce was still going. Red

sauce started to boil and rise, threatening to spill over the sides.

He grabbed the handle and shoved it off the stove, burning his

hand. “Fuck!” He flung the faucet handle up, stuck his hand

under the cold water.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He didn’t respond. Just kept moving his hand slowly under

that water. I picked my shoes back up. I grabbed my sweatshirt

out of the closet. I left through the deck door, went down the

steps and out to the beach. I was done with him right then.

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Deb Caletti

The sun was setting. There were streaks of an artist’s pink

brush in the far-off parts of the sky. They wouldn’t last long. It got

cold at night on the beach. I walked toward town, away from the

lighthouse and Annabelle Aurora’s shack. If I kept walking and

walking, I could end up near the docks where
Obsession
was, and

the small house that Finn had pointed out to me, the one where

his family lived.

I looked down; my eyes picked amongst the shell chips and

rocks and seaweed bits for something worth keeping. I didn’t

understand what was happening. My father had always been

clear and whole and present to me. He was there for me in any

way I needed, and I was there for him, too. We were on the same

side. But something felt changed about that now—a dividing line

had been drawn. I was the sand, and I could see where it started

and ended. But he was the sea, and it went on and on, to places I

didn’t know or couldn’t imagine.

Still, I had places of me he couldn’t see, right? So there was

no good reason it couldn’t work the other way, too. I wondered

if parents had an easier time with the secrets their children kept

than children did with the secrets of their parents. A parent’s

secrets seemed like some sort of betrayal, where my own just

seemed like a fact of life and growing up and away. I was sup-

posed to be independent, but he was supposed to be available.

Him having his own life seemed selfish, where me having my

own was the right order of things.

I thought about Annabelle Aurora’s daughters. They must

have felt that, too, when she moved across the country, away

from them, to this beach. I kept walking until I was too cold.

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Stay

Until I realized that we complain about our parents acting like

they own us, and yet maybe we’re worse at that than they are.

I headed back home. I thought I’d come to some conclusion

in my mind, that I would just let things be. He could have his

secrets if they meant that much to him. Fine. But then I saw the

car gone. Inside, that pan was back on the stove, the blue flame

flicking low, the sauce burned down to a black crust. He could

have burned our house down.

The Christmas card of our mystery host sat on the kitchen

table where he’d left it. I wished this was something my mother

could do—send a card after all these years to tell us how she was

doing wherever she was. Funny, she had always been
my mother

and not
Mom
in my mind, as if we didn’t quite know each other

well enough yet to drop the formality.

God, I know that’s not how she ever would have wanted it,

though. It was my one comforting thought, how she’d never have

left if she could have helped it. It gave me some weird reassur-

ance, like her arms were around me still. She would have wanted

to be with me always, to know my favorite music, to know I hated

scratchy tags and green peppers and that my allergies got bad

when the Scotch broom bloomed. That’s what a mother would

always want, right? See, we had a complicated relationship, my

mother and I.36* I wondered what she would say to me now. It

was strange how near she felt lately.

The house was too quiet. I thought about starting dinner

36 I guess even death doesn’t make your relationship with your mother less com-

plicated.

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Deb Caletti

all over again so that it would be fixed when he returned, but I

decided I wasn’t even that hungry. I ate a bowl of cereal in the

name of dinner-duty, and the pouring of the milk sounded loud,

and so did the spoon against the bowl and the sound of my own

crunching in my head.

Sometimes maybe you should let someone you love travel

great distances away from you. You shouldn’t think you needed to

set out to retrieve them and put them back where they belonged.

Sometimes they were only safe and happy, like Annabelle

Aurora. And then other times, it was just possible they were lost

at sea. It would be your duty, then, to get out into the boat and

search, even if the waves were choppy and the wind was howling

the protests of the dead.

My father didn’t come back that night. At least, not until the very

early hours of the morning, just before my own alarm went off.

I knew, because I was sleeping the 60 percent sleep of worried

people, where part of your mind is listening from the shallow

depths of a dream. I woke up when I heard the car’s engine and

the crunch of tires driving up. He was trying to be quiet, but I

knew how that went. I had snuck out before to see Christian. I

understood the near-silent turning of door handles.

I let Dad sleep and went to work. I was surprised to see Roger

trotting around freely in front of the visitors’ center, sniffing and

digging, his little butt sticking up and his nose down in a hole

he’d made.

“Roger!” I called. He looked up. I might as well have just

caught him with a bag of loot in front of the bank. Anyone who

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Stay

says dogs don’t feel human feelings are wrong, if you ask me.

You see guilt and shame and disappointment and hope right on

their sweet furry faces. They’ve got everything but words.37*

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

I would have liked to hear the answer to that one. You won-

der if dogs would lie, too, if they could talk. But Roger was too

shocked to do the dog lie of slinking off. He was still standing

there being the stunned perpetrator.

I scooped him up and went inside. The air smelled like frying

butter and vanilla. A familiar smell I couldn’t place at first. Then

I realized. French toast. Sylvie came downstairs when she heard

the door.

“Oh!” she said. She wore a soft lavender blouse I’d never

seen before and the same expression Roger had had when I’d

walked up.

“Roger was out front,” I said.

“Oh, no! I did not even see him escape,” she said.

Sure, because love or sex or whatever it was could make you

careless about the other people around you. It could make you

careless about everything, even the love and sex itself, that’s how

powerful it was. I knew about this. I put my nose in Roger’s fur. He

smelled like he’d been gardening—that aroma of cool, fresh dirt.

“Lucky he didn’t go far,” I said. I set him down. He started hopping

around on his back legs near Sylvie, but she didn’t pick him up.

“What do you want me to do here today?” I asked. My voice

was sharp.

37 And, you know, the ability to drive a car and go to college.

* 201 *

Deb Caletti

“Just the usual, Clara.” Sylvie opened the cash register with

her tiny keys.

“All right,” I said. “Fine.”

“You’re angry with me,” she said.

She was right. I guess I was. I didn’t know why, exactly. I took

my seat behind the register. Sylvie had now become someone

my father had turned to, someone who could be important to

him, and I had to decide how I felt about that. My feelings were

jumbled up. You could have Feeling A and Feeling B and Feeling

C, but once you got to D and E, it was all too much and they

smashed together in a big mess.38*

I didn’t have time to sort anything out, though, because just

then a couple poked their heads around the door—a bookish man

with a white beard and a small, sparrowlike lady. They whispered,

the way you do in quiet places, like you might awaken the place

itself with your voice. They asked if they could see the lighthouse,

and instead of leading them outside toward the small narrow

lighthouse door or telling them sharply that the lighthouse itself

was not open to the public, she tossed me her keys. She handed

over three sets of the gloves visitors wore inside to protect the

highly polished brass of the upper floors.

“Go,” she said.

I guess sleeping with my father earned me some increased

responsibilities on the job. I hoped it meant a pay raise, too.

38 Some people can keep going through F and G and H, and some reach their limit at

A. I’m sure this ties right into mental illness somehow. You know, how soon you reach

the tipping point.

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Stay

I’d never opened the small lighthouse door on my own before,

and I had trouble with the key. Finally we were inside, looking

up the long curve of metal stairs. The stairs wound around the

cement center pole, which housed the clockwork. Long ago the

clockwork used to rotate the shade around the lamp so that the

beam of light would appear to go on and off.

It was freezing in there. And there was good reason Sylvie

didn’t usually let people go up. First, the long climb on steep,

narrow steps. Then, once you finally got to the uppermost floor

where the lamp was, there was the shock of where you stood.

The lamp was in the center, and you stood on the deck around it.

Around that deck was the old crystal casing you could see when

you were outside, the glass that acted as a giant lens, making the

light visible for miles. Meaning that when you stood there and

looked through that glass, you saw only the hundred-foot drop

down to the rocks below. There was the vast stretch of ocean, the

cliffs, the most amazing view around, but the visual fact of how

high up you were was impossible not to notice. The first time I

went up with Sylvie, my stomach dropped and my heart squeezed

in warning. You knew that the old glass has been there forever.

You knew you wouldn’t suddenly drop through. But, obviously,

certain pieces of you didn’t quite believe that.

Of course, we never took anyone out to the outside deck,

where the brave keepers (and now a special service) used to go to

clean that glass. The deck where The Lovely Mrs. Bishop leaped

to her death.

Our feet clanged loudly on the steps, a long rhythmic

march. On the way up, the couple (who’d introduced them-

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Deb Caletti

selves as Hal and Sharon) stopped to gaze out of the long rect-

angular windows, though it was probably just a sneak move to